Abstract. The European Union Floods Directive requires the establishment of flood maps for high risk areas in all European member states by 2013. However, the current practice of flood mapping in Europe still shows some deficits. Firstly, flood maps are frequently seen as an information tool rather than a communication tool. This means that, for example, local stocks of knowledge are not incorporated. Secondly, the contents of flood maps often do not match the requirements of the end-users. Finally, flood maps are often designed and visualised in a way that cannot be easily understood by residents at risk and/or that is not suitable for the respective needs of public authorities in risk and event management. The RISK MAP project examined how end-user participation in the mapping process may be used to overcome these barriers and enhance the communicative power of flood maps, fundamentally increasing their effectiveness.Based on empirical findings from a participatory approach that incorporated interviews, workshops and eye-tracking tests, conducted in five European case studies, this paper outlines recommendations for user-specific enhancements of flood maps. More specific, recommendations are given with regard to (1) appropriate stakeholder participation processes, which allow incorporating local knowledge and preferences, (2) the improvement of the contents of flood maps by considering user-specific needs and (3) the improvement of the visualisation of risk maps in order to produce user-friendly and understandable risk maps for the user groups concerned. Furthermore, "idealised" maps for different user groups are presented: for strategic planning, emergency management and the public.

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Abstract. Managing the crisis caused by natural disasters, and especially by floods, requires the development of effective evacuation systems. An effective evacuation system must take into account certain constraints, including those related to traffic network, accessibility, human resources and material equipment (vehicles, collecting points, etc.). The main objective of this work is to provide assistance to technical services and rescue forces in terms of accessibility by offering itineraries relating to rescue and evacuation of people and property. We consider in this paper the evacuation of an urban area of medium size exposed to the hazard of flood. In case of inundation, most people will be evacuated using their own vehicles. Two evacuation types are addressed in this paper: (1) a preventive evacuation based on a flood forecasting system and (2) an evacuation during the disaster based on flooding scenarios. The two study sites on which the developed evacuation model is applied are the Tours valley (Fr, 37), which is protected by a set of dikes (preventive evacuation), and the Gien valley (Fr, 45), which benefits from a low rate of flooding (evacuation before and during the disaster). Our goal is to construct, for each of these two sites, a chronological evacuation plan, i.e., computing for each individual the departure date and the path to reach the assembly point (also called shelter) according to a priority list established for this purpose. The evacuation plan must avoid the congestion on the road network. Here we present a spatiotemporal optimization model (STOM) dedicated to the evacuation of the population exposed to natural disasters and more specifically to flood risk.

Hydrological models are an important basis of flood forecasting and early warning systems. They provide significant data of the hydrological risk. In combination with other modelling techniques, such as hydrodynamic models, they can be used to assess the extent and impacts of hydrological events. The new European Flood Directive forces all member states to evaluate flood risk on a catchment scale, compile maps of flood hazard and flood risk for prone areas and inform on a local level about these risks. Flood hazard and flood risk maps are important tools to communicate flood risk to different target groups. They provide compiled information events to relevant public bodies like water management authorities, municipalities or disaster control staffs, but also the broad public. For almost each section of a river basin runoff and water levels can be defined based on the likelihood of annual recurrence, using a combination of hydrological and hydrodynamic models, or based on historical records and mappings. In combination with data of the vulnerability of a region risk maps can be derived. The project RISKCATCH addresses the issue of hydrological risks and vulnerability assessment in the focus of the flood risk management process. Flood hazard maps and flood risk maps were compiled by Austrian and German partners at test sites in these two countries regarding existing national and international guidelines and were evaluated by the French partner within the so called "experimental graphic semiology". This is a method to record the eye movement of a person watching a map. It provides information how the test person is parsing and reading the map. A questionnaire asking for negative and positive aspects and complexity of each single map completes the experimental graphic semiology. The results indicate how these types of maps can be improved to fit the needs of different user groups. As an outcome recommendations are developed to water management authorities how to derive maps from hydrological and hydrodynamic model results and provide information about hydrological risks.

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The evacuation of population exposed to flood hazard requires the establishment of a specific transportation network. This is to compute escape routes to be taken by affected population. At evacuation time, inhabitants of affected area must be evacuated through transportation network to safety area. The main objective of this work is to provide assistance to rescue forces in terms of accessibility by providing itinieraries between buildings at risk of flooding and safety points equipped for this purpose. Technically, the problem of k-shortest paths between two nodes in network has been extensively studied in the literature offering several efficient algorithms for different applications. Those algorithms so-called ranking methods aim to compute the first shortest path then the second one and so on. It's well known that the computation in ranking methods is based only on one criterion which is generally distance or time. Often a single criterion is not sufficient in some real-world problems (road network, internet, etc.,) where one or several supplementary criteria (such as cost, capacity, security, etc.,) must also be taken into consideration. This multi-criteria optimization so-called labeling method aims to compute a Pareto front that represents a set of non-dominated paths. However it is very difficult to take a decision on which k-paths to select among this set and especially when selected paths are served as a data input for a sensitive problem such as the evacuation. We contribute in this paper to establish an evacuation network dedicated to the evacuation of population exposed to natural hazards and more particularly to flood hazard. Two ranking methods to compute paths between each origin (building)-destination (shelter) pair are presented. The criteria free-flow travel time, capacity and number of lanes of road are considered in computing paths. Thus we aim in the proposed ranking approach to simulate a multi-criteria aspect by combining travel time and number of lanes as weight function. The establishment of network (determination of k-paths between each building and shelter associated) is then performed according to several measures we introduce in this paper.